"No sight that the human eyes can look upon is more provocative of
awe than is the night sky scattered thick with stars. But this
silence made visible, this silence made audible, does not
necessarily give rise to a religious mood. It may evoke a mood that
neither requires nor postulates a God. On frosty January nights when
I walk over the downs I feel myself to be passing through a lofty
heathen temple, a temple without devil-affrighting steeple bells,
without altars of stone or altars of wood. Constellation beyond
constellation, the unaltering white splash of the Milky Way, and no
sign of benison, no sign of bane, only the homely hedgerow shadows
and the earth's resigned stillness outstretched under the
unparticipating splendour of a physical absolute."

Llewelyn Powys was born in Dorchester, Dorset, spent his childhood
at Montacute, Somerset, and as an adult lived for varying periods in
Kenya, the United States, Dorset and Switzerland. His twenty-six
books include a novel, Apples be Ripe, a biography, Henry
Hudson, essays descriptive and polemical, memoirs and
reminiscences. Of all the Powys brothers, Llewelyn was recognized as
the most cheerful, the most at ease with existence: the only one for
whom a title such as Glory of Life could hold not a shadow of
the ironic. Llewelyn's epicurean philosophy is intimately related to
the tuberculosis with which he struggled for thirty years.

Among Llewelyn's best books are Black Laughter, about life in
Africa, Skin for Skin, a memoir of his first attack of
tuberculosis and residence in a Swiss sanatorium, Impassioned
Clay, a statement of his philosophical outlook, the essays
collected in Earth Memories, Dorset Essays,
Somerset Essays and Swiss Essays, and the fictionalized
autobiography Love and Death. In their blend of the
descriptive, the reminiscent, and the polemical, Llewelyn's best
writings have retained both their urgency of appeal and their charm
of evocation.

Malcolm Elwin, his first biographer, described Llewelyn Powys as 'a
philosophical poet relating the pleasures of his senses in the
purest prose of his time'.

Major Works of Llewelyn Powys

Ebony and Ivory
(1923)

Thirteen Worthies
(1923)

Black Laughter
(1924)

Skin for Skin
(1925)

The Verdict of Bridlegoose
(1926)

Henry Hudson
(1927)

The Cradle of God
(1929)

The Pathetic Fallacy
(1930)

Apples Be Ripe
(1930)

A Pagan’s Pilgrimage
(1931)

Impassioned Clay
(1931)

Glory of Life
(1934)

Earth Memories
(1934)

Damnable Opinions
(1935)

Dorset Essays
(1935)

The Twelve Months
(1936)

Rats in the Sacristy
(1937)

Somerset Essays
(1937)

Love and Death
(1939)

A Baker’s Dozen
(1939)

Swiss Essays
(1947)

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Llewelyn
Powys in New York, 1928. Photo by Doris Ulmann

Recently published paperbacks by Llewelyn Powys

LLEWELYN POWYS: RECALLED TO LIFE, 1911

Edited by Peter J. FOSS

By the spring of 1911, the writer Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939) – then only
26 – had spent eighteen months at a Swiss sanatorium, being treated for the
tuberculosis which the previous year had nearly killed him. Still frail, he
returned to England, and to Montacute, the Somerset home of his family, where
his father had been vicar for 26 years.

The Powys Press August 2016

LLEWELYN POWYS: A CONSUMPTIVE'S
DIARY, 1910

Edited by Peter J. FOSS

Like
Katherine Mansfield’s journal from the same period, Llewelyn Powys’s diary is a
major record from inside the consumptive experience and adds significantly to
our understanding of the ordeal of this deadly and durable disease in the first
half of the twentieth century.

A new edition of EARTH MEMORIES by
Llewelyn PowysWith An Introduction by John Gray

‘These
essays celebrate the life of the spirit – not by turning to an otherworldly
realm, or retreating into the shadowy depths of the mind, but by standing still
and looking anew at the sun and rain and the changing seasons. As Powys shows,
the human spirit is reborn when it sees the natural world as it actually is – a spectacle of inexhaustible beauty.’ JOHN
GRAY

“Earth
Memories opens with an essay called “A Struggle for Life”, that
describes the course of his consumption, and how Kenya was good for his
health, despite its hardships. Back in England, Powys invests in a
“revolving shelter” and puts it in a hermit’s spot near Weymouth. “In
the early mornings I would wake to look upon a small still bay with
rocks and rippling pools. Little hedge birds would begin to twitter on
the grey stone wall near the empty nettle-filled well, while over a
restless sea, behind the outline of a cornfield, black hungry
cormorants would follow each other on their way to their distant
feeding places.” Occasionally puffed up with Augustan effort, prone to
grandiloquent if often charming quirks, Powys’s prose falls easily into
this manner of general description, as it hops from phrase to
descriptive phrase.”

Michael Caines reviews THE CONQUERING WORMand the new version
ofEARTH
MEMORIESin
The TLS

Conspicuous
Consumption

The
Conqueror Worm: Llewelyn Powys – A Consumptive’s Diary, 1910

By Peter
J Foss (ed)

JOHN GRAYreview in The Literary Review

The
youngest of three brothers who became highly distinctive writers in the
early decades of the last century, Llewelyn Powys is today the least
read. This is surprising, since in some ways he is now the most
resonant. At the present time religion and atheism contend in much the
same way they did nearly a century ago when Powys first began to
publish on the subject, and now as then his approach to this conflict
is refreshingly unorthodox. Like his brothers (there were eleven
siblings in total), Llewelyn rejected the Christianity of his father, a
Somerset parson whom they all loved and revered. But while John Cowper
Powys ended up in a Montaigne-like scepticism and Theodore Powys
settled into an earthy acceptance of mystery and mortality, Llewelyn
became a passionate opponent of religion – a latter-day Lucretius who
railed against otherworldly faith as an illusion that spoilt the joy of
life. Unlike our more pedestrian atheists, he also recognised the human
value of religion, seeing it as a poetic response to the encounter with
death that was his own most formative experience.
In November 1909, at the age of twenty-five, Llewelyn discovered he had consumption:

The
shock of discovering myself to be really ill had the strangest effect
on me. I became like one drunken with wine. A torrent of words flowed
from my mouth. I acted as if death were not the end of every child born
into the world, but an event which for some mysterious reason had been
reserved for me alone. I felt nothing but pride in finding myself laid
by the heels so neatly. I liked to get what sensation I could out of
it; and yet, deep in my heart, I refused to realise how grave my
sickness was. I liked to talk about dying, but I had no mind to die. I
liked to rail against God, but I had no mind that He should hear me …
My head had been completely turned, and I chittered at Death like a
little grey squirrel who is up a fir tree out of harm’s way.

This passage comes from Powys’s Skin for Skin (1925), an unsparing and
yet often lyrical memoir of his encounter with the pulmonary
tuberculosis from which he would suffer for the rest of his life. When
writing the memoir, Powys mined a diary he kept during his year in a
sanatorium at Clavadel near Davos in Switzerland, and it is this
journal, meticulously edited and annotated so the reader can catch the
significance of its many literary allusions, that the Powys scholar
Peter Foss has given us.
With an immediacy the exquisitely written memoir cannot match, the
diary reveals how this high-spirited young Edwardian reacted to the
onset of a disease that, before the advent of antibiotic treatment, was
commonly regarded as a death sentence. Powys lived on for thirty years,
dying only in December 1939 as a result of a perforated ulcer. During
all of this time he fought ceaselessly against the disease without
sacrificing what he regarded as life’s supreme pleasures. For him the
sanatorium was not only a place where death was always near, but a
sexual playground where the morality in which he had been reared could
be shaken off and forgotten.
On Sunday 10 July 1910, Powys suffered a haemorrhage. At this point the
diary entries come to a stop with the word BLOOD, which is itself
written in blood. When the entries are resumed, over a month later,
they record Powys continuing in erotic encounters with fellow patients
by whom he risked being reinfected and dallying with a girl he met on
one of his no less perilous mountain walks. Amid these interludes and
bouts of fever and coughing, Powys fortified himself with readings from
Andrew Marvell and Thomas Hardy, Pater and Maupassant, Nietzsche and
Wilde. This rich intellectual fare nourished the philosophy that was
emerging in him – a starkly uncompromising version of hedonism, which
unlike that of Lucretius was willing to risk peace of mind, even life
itself, in the pursuit of heightened sensation.
In all of Powys’s writings – the two books of impressions of Africa he
wrote after travelling there for his health and spending five years in
the bush as a sheep farmer, his accounts of his travels in Palestine,
America and the Caribbean, the dozens of short articles and essays
celebrating the landscape and life of Dorset, where he later settled,
and the ‘imaginary autobiography’ Love and Death, completed a year
before he died – he presents life as a gift of chance, which can only
be fully appreciated once any belief that it has intrinsic meaning or
purpose has been left behind. Accepting that his illness was incurable,
he knew that the pursuit of pleasure would never be without pain. As
Philip Larkin wrote, Llewelyn Powys is ‘one of the few writers who
teach endurance of life as well as its enjoyment’.
In a richly illuminating introduction, Foss situates Powys’s diary in
an early 20th-century literature of the tuberculous experience of which
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) is the best-known example. To
my mind the vignettes in Powys’s diary are more vividly memorable than
Mann’s set pieces: Powys’s fellow patient ‘the philosophic Hungarian’
Dr Szende, author of a book on Napoleon, lying dying in bed reading
Schopenhauer while ‘inhaling some white powder and smoking an enormous
cigar’; the aftermath of the death of ‘the pachydermatous German’, when
‘four figures tip-toed along the white corridors and down the marble
staircase, bearing on their shoulders a long and heavy burden’ to be
taken to ‘the Dead house in Davos’; Powys on a twilit balcony shrinking
from a lover, a ‘beautiful white-limbed vampire’ with whom he had
recklessly frolicked; or talking with his closest friend in the
sanatorium, an English ‘scholar and gentleman’ called Wilbraham, whose
conventional pieties Powys mercilessly mocked. At times the atmosphere
recorded in the diary is so heavily sexualised that Foss comments, ‘One
can almost smell the semen on the page.’ At others the mood is one of
pathos, as when Powys writes of the girl from Cornwall who yearned for
nothing more than the companionship of her dogs.
An unfinished story written in 1912–13 that Foss includes at the end of
The Conqueror Worm makes clear the lesson Powys took from his illness.
The experience did not make him more prudent or in any conventional
sense more moral. Instead it strengthened his resolve to enjoy life
‘without restrictions’. ‘If God restored me’, Powys wrote, ‘I thought I
would live more eagerly, more wickedly than ever and with far more
craft.’ Recording a bold and original mind seeking and finding delight
in life while facing the prospect of imminent death, this must surely
be one of the most remarkable diaries that has been published in many
years.

Sunday,
30 August 2015

Radio 4 (8.48 AM): A Point of View

John Gray looks to history to argue that it's time to rethink today's narrow
view of atheism.

He ponders the lives of two little known atheists from the past - the
nineteenth century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and the
Somerset essayist and novelist Llewelyn Powys. He says their work shows
how atheism can be far richer and subtler than the version we're familiar with.

"The predominant strand of contemporary unbelief, which aims to convert
the world to a scientific view of things, is only one way of living without an
idea of God" writes Gray.

First published in 1925, Skin For Skin is a deeply personal
account of Llewelyn Powys’ encounter with tuberculosis, which he contracted in
1909 at the age of twenty-five. In those days, prior to the discovery of
antibiotics, TB - or consumption as it was then called - was a leading cause of
death; for Powys, the bubbling sensation in his lungs and the blood in his
mouth amounted to a sentence of death. In the pages of this uncompromising
memoir we accompany him to a Swiss sanitarium to recover his health, then back
to the south of England for a period of convalescence, hoping that the symptoms
of the “hideous complaint” do not return.

Hoping - but not praying. For Powys, an atheist, there is no
comfort in a belief in God and an immortal soul, and so he finds himself
staring into the abyss. The experience, as so much else in the book, is
recounted in powerfully vivid, lyrical prose: “I would wake in the small hours
of the morning swaddled in fear. With scared eyes I would peer into the
darkness of my room, and into the unknown days before me, and come to realize,
during those tense, suspended moments, how completely unattended, how
intolerably alone we are, each one of us, like cattle herded into a merciless
stockyard, to be driven into the shambles, separately, when our turn comes.”

And yet, despite the soulless darkness, there is reason for
existence. As we see in Skin For Skin, Powys finds it in enjoying life
to the fullest, in feasting upon it while he has it, in squeezing the last drop
of joy from each day. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle concluded in its
review in 1925, "Rugged, brutal and yet, in spots, tender, Skin For
Skin makes life worth living after all."

November 2014 • pb 9780992078676 • 146pp • £6.95

Two reviews of Llewelyn Powys’ A STRUGGLE FOR LIFEby John Vernon here and Jeff Bursey here

Four volumes of Llewelyn Powys's Diary Each edited and with an Introduction by Peter
J. Foss

The Diary of a
Sherborne Schoolboy:Diary for 1903

36 pp.
incl. 5 illus., card covers, ISBN 1-897967-04-7 £7.00

The Diary of a Reluctant Teacher:Diary for 1908

60 pp.
incl. 11 illus., card covers, ISBN 1-897967-49-7 £8.00

The Immemorial Year:Diary for 1909

68 pp.
incl. 10 illus., card covers, ISBN 1-897967-84-5 £9.00

NEWThe Conqueror Worm:
Diary for 1910

Llewelyn Powys
(1884-1939), novelist and essayist, was born at Dorchester, Dorset, on
13 August 1884, and educated at Sherborne School, 1899-1903, and Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, 1903-1906. He was a stock farmer in Kenya,
1914-1919, and a journalist in New York City, 1920-1925. After marrying
Alyse Gregory(1884-1967) in 1924, Llewelyn returned to the Dorset
headland and travelled with his wife, paying visits to Palestine
(1928), and the West Indies (1930). He and Alyse lived at
Chydyock Farmhose where he continued to write many dozens of essays. He
died in Switzerland on 2 December 1939.

BATS HEAD

(Published in Dorset Essays.)

To anyone with good eyesight, the great
promontory of Bats Head can be seen from Weymouth Esplanade. It projects into
the sea a few miles to the west of Lulworth, and far below on each side of its
perpendicular chalk face lie two deserted beaches, the one to the east falling
away to the Durdle Door, and the other to the west extending as far as White
Nose. It is a remarkable headland. On afternoons of the wildest weather a man
may rest here in tranquillity, some peculiarity in the structure of the cliff
causing the rushing gales to cast themselves straight up from its sheer walls,
so that the crest of the headland remains in an absolute calm. Seated on this
halcyon ledge it is possible to observe in peace the riot of the sea-coast
below; to look down upon great black-backed gulls flying in wide circles along
the margins of the breaking waves; or to watch at close quarters the cormorants
pressing their bodies in mid-air against the wind, their black necks tilted
upwards.

There is something outlandish and
forbidding about cormorants. Milton must have recognised a turpitude in them or
he would never have made Satan select this particular disguise for entering the
tropical acres of the Garden of Eden. How obstinate an egoism have these
gluttonous sea-crows! Wherever they are it is the same, whether settling upon
the water like mallards, or in groups upon a rock stretching out their wings
like black fans to dry, or when, with the deliberation characteristic of them,
they sweep forward through a marine twilight to their selected roosting places.
What secret mandate are they obeying on such occasions? At whose word do these
impious birds direct their unerring flight over the face of the waters? Bewick
says that in some parts of the world men make leather jackets out of cormorant
skins. How admirable to be defended against wind and sleet by a jerkin of
cormorant pelts! In the reign of Charles I the position of Master of the
Cormorants was a much-prized office – and no wonder. Who could aspire to a more
impressive and singular title? Imagine the curtains of the royal audience-room
thrown open and the doorkeeper announcing the entrance of so carefree a
functionary!

In sophisticated subtlety the cormorant is
not to be compared with the guillemots. There is a narrow ledge halfway up Bats
Head where the guillemots have congregated in the nesting season for time out
of mind. Here they will stand for hours upon their black webbed feet, nodding
like punctilious mandarins at each other, until embarrassed by their own self-conscious
manners they dive off from their chalky platform, and with their odd mechanical
flight circle down to the sea. With us the return of the guillemots each spring
is a recording place in the advance of the seasons. ‘The foolish guillemots
have come,’ we say, as others speak of the first arrival of the swallows. What
a commentary it is upon the brutal insensitiveness of man that these refined
birds should have won for themselves the epithet of foolish; foolish, forsooth,
because ‘in their piety’ they will remain upon their eggs until fishermen can
catch them and wring their necks.

It is, of course, the herring gulls which
through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, make up the real bird-population of
these cliffs. It is their hungry call that first breaks the religious stillness
of the winter dawn, vexing the waking dreams of the countrymen with their wild
insistent crying, before even the red glow is to be seen through the lowest
branches of the naked hedge. It is these birds which may also be seen walking
on the grasslands in November, white as a flock of fairy-tale geese, or rising
up suddenly out of rain-soaked stubble, like a shower of snow in a child’s
glass ball. At this time of the year they come in from the restless sea, from
the ridged weed-drifting margins of the shingle, to glut their insatiable
appetites upon the lowly victuals of the soil. Up into the cloudy winter sky
they mount with their free strong flight, a flight so different from that of a
chapel of starlings suddenly flushed and close-clustering as a swarm of bees.

How the knavish cliff-jackdaws are forever
striving to imitate the balance, the aerial poise, of these incomparable white
birds, and yet for all their javeline dartings they can never escape the
ordained limitations of their being.

The White Nose ravens seem entirely to
disregard all other fowl. Their dark shadows cross and recross the sloping
shoulders of the downs, but they are always flying alone, the male and the
female, with solitary, mutual love. In February, when they prepare for their
first clutch of eggs, they are self-sufficient, and in mid-winter, when they
come in over Swyre Head after a morning’s scavenging on the Chesil Beach, it is
the same. What a massive self-absorption is suggested by the croak of a raven, as
it disturbs the stillness of a Sunday afternoon far up above the gorse and
carline thistles. No wonder to primitive minds this harsh utterance seemed to
conceal hidden meanings, dark occult messages, decrees of a dolorous Fate.

There is only one pair of ravens nesting
now at White Nose. Each autumn they drive their offspring westward. These
unnatural battles usually take place above the undercliff, towards Ringstead. I
was once told by the late Mr Hardy that when he was a boy it was a common thing
to see village people bless themselves as these birds flew above the thatched
roofs of their cottages far inland, so that seventy or eighty years ago ravens
must have been less rare in Dorset than now.

Aloof though the White Nose ravens are
there is one bird that breaks in upon their proud isolation. For some obscure
reason the heavy, dark flight of these giants of the air is exasperating to
peregrine falcons. The war between the ravens and these hawks is as perennial
as the traditional contest between pigmies and cranes. A peregrine falcon will
pester a raven in its flight for several miles together, soaring high up above
it and then with a deadly swoop darting downwards. I have seen them knock
feathers out of the raven’s body, but never do serious harm, and it is
astonishing how the great bird knows when to turn upon its back in mid-air at
the very instant when in its downward rush the peregrine is ready to strike. If
the peregrine’s attacks become too insistent the raven will fly to the ground,
and whenever it is driven to this extremity the hawk will molest it no further,
appreciating, I suppose, how formidable a weapon is its heavy, black, hollow
beak – a true Saxon battle-axe!

Men have sought for the secret of life in
temples and in cathedrals. They have worshipped in moonlit groves and before
the sacrificial stones of monolithic circles. With closed lips and shut eyes
they have waited and listened for God in cornfields and vine- yards. I think
there are few places more fitted for such moods of religious receptivity than
is this undisturbed sea-cliff. Here for thousands upon thousands of years the
sunlight and the sea and the masterless winds have held tryst together, and
nature, under the sway of so mighty a trinity, shows without reluctance her
hidden moods, moods violent and material, moods of a severe and chaste beauty,
and moods that are full of a deep and tremulous earth-poetry.